Kathleen used to love life. She had plans, dreams, and faith in life; but that was before the accident that took it all away from her in an instant. Now that her beloved brother is dead and she’s confined to a wheelchair, her future is but a dark cloud hovering above her head. How can she ever find the will to move on and keep living without him? Even the cares of the happy-go-lucky American physiotherapist who’s helping her with her rehab therapies are all in vain. Life seems to have lost its meaning, until one night she receives an unexpected celestial visit…

Colin has been working as a physiotherapist in Dublin for almost five years, but he’s never bonded so much with a patient like he is bonding with Kathleen; there’s something about those sad blue eyes that makes him want to help her, to take away the pain that reminds him so much of his own. Having lost both his parents in a plane crash when he was only sixteen, Colin knows how it feels to have someone you love taken so abruptly away from you, and he makes it his mission to help Kathleen find her faith in life again. But something changes along the way…

Sometimes love can work miracles. If you believe.

“Hey.”

I turned when I heard her voice and saw her in the wheelchair, her braided hair over her shoulder. She looked so beautiful I wanted to reach out my hand and stroke her sleepy face. I wanted it so much I had to break eye contact for a minute before I lost control and made a fool of myself.

“Oh, hi. I’m sorry, did I wake you?” I asked as nonchalantly as I could, although my heart was beating fast in my chest.

She smiled and shook her head, staring at my hand.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I don’t,” I replied instinctively. Her eyes lit up with amusement and I realized how stupid I must have sounded.

“That looks pretty much like a cigarette to me,” she said, pointing. I bent my head and smiled.

“No, what I meant to say was I’m not a smoker.” I looked at the cigarette in my hand, and suddenly the words were released without asking for permission. “I used to smoke when I was in one of my dark moments, but I don’t anymore.”

What the hell was wrong with me? Why did I always end up opening myself up with her as if she could understand what I’d been through? Why couldn’t I simply lie my way out of her question, the way I’d always done with everyone?

“Are you now? In a dark moment, I mean?” She looked up at me and her huge blue eyes widened in concern. Why did she have to be so sweet and so damn beautiful? It made lying so much harder and I couldn’t afford to let her get close to me, to break through the wall around my heart any more than she already had.

“Well, you almost—we almost died in a fire. I have every right to be a little shaken, don’t you think?”

She chuckled, and as I looked at her I realized I didn’t need that cigarette anymore. I stubbed it out in the plastic ashtray on the small iron table in the corner of the balcony.

All I really needed was to see that beautiful smile of hers. The rest didn’t matter.

I couldn’t help but smile. She was tearing down the wall brick by brick, and I felt a fire in my heart just looking into her eyes. I needed to break the spell, before it was too late.

“Let’s get back inside,” I said, approaching her and instinctively pushing her wheelchair. “I promised to take care of you, and I won’t be keeping my word if you get sick.”

“I’m a big girl,” she said in a mocking tone. “I can take care of myself.”

“Of course,” I replied, mimicking her tone and playing her game. “I tend to forget that, Your Majesty!”

“Colin! Don’t start again!” she screamed, without hiding her exasperation, and I laughed.

An avid reader since her childhood years and being an only child, Roberta always enjoyed the company of her fictional friends from the children’s books she loved reading, while she dreamed of writing her own stories one day.

It was when she discovered novels by authors Rosamunde Pilcher and Maeve Binchy in her teenage years that she realized it was time she put down in words the stories she had kept well hidden in her mind until then.

What started as a hobby, soon turned into a real passion and a way of life, until she could no longer keep the stories to herself, and decided to get over her fears and share them with the world.

Roberta lives in Italy, but her dream is to move out of her country and live either in a thatched cottage in the Irish countryside or in a country house with a swing on the back porch, somewhere in the United States, where she would love to spend her days writing novels as a full-time job, and maybe one day even get as far as writing a screenplay for a movie.